I was talking to one of our account managers who has been consulting with a client looking to sell ads on their website. I got to thinking that the concept of putting together a fast and easy media kit for this purpose would be a good topic for a blog post, so here goes…
I know that there are a lot of schools of thought out there as to what goes into a media kit but I think that in most cases you can keep things really simple and it will serve you well. Of course if you are going after a really big fish, like Nike or Apple, you are going to need a lot more fluff. In my opinion, there are three key components that the average advertiser is going to want to know, these are:
What is Your Website About?
What is your website about? You should probably put together a few paragraphs describing what your website is about. What information do you provide? Who visits your website?
What Kind of Traffic Do You Have?
Who visits your website? How much traffic do you receive? What are your top keywords, search terms, etc.? What are some of your top referrers? What geographic areas do you do well in? All of this information should be very easy to access from your Google Analytics reports.
What Are You Selling?
You should graphically demonstrate what you are selling. How big are the ads (in pixels, shape, etc) and where are they going to be displayed on your site. You should also cover whether the ads are going to be displayed in rotation with other ads so that the advertiser has a clear understanding. You will want to include what the costs for the ads are, and what the terms are for each. You will also want to include a fee for any ads that you have to design in-house, this is important, don’t spend all afternoon designing a banner ad for free! If you have requirements for the ads in terms of size, you should also specify those here. You obviously don’t want to open yourself up to large animated files that could affect your websites performance.
Don’t Forget to Add The Snazzy Cover Page
You will want the overall look and feel of your media kit to resemble your website and corporate branding, definitely nothing in black and white, add some color. I prefer PDF as the format for media kits online, and I think that they should be made available on your website so that potential advertisers can easily find them.
Hope this helps, if you have questions or suggestions, comment me below…
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Again, if you are going after a really big fish, you are going to need to include a lot more information. I have put together media kits that ranged from 4 pages to 30 pages in the past.
My sincere opinion is that one very important aspect of monetizing your website is web site traffic. This means that having a normal flow of vsitors per day that will remain constant through out time, is one target that you should have in mind.